I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. | Romans 12:1-2
In my last post, I defined the conscience through what it accomplishes in the life of the believer and encouraged engaging with the conscience more regularly. If it is Jesus prayer for us to be sanctified in truth, then we should diligently practice the means He has given us to get there. As Paul encourages us above, we should make our lives an act of worship as we work to be transformed by the Spirit, through the conscience.
The alternative, Paul tells us in Romans 12, is to be conformed to the world. If we do not follow our conscience we will follow something else. The Bible gives us some guidance about what searing the conscience will do to us.
LAWLESSNESS
For our boast is this, the testimony of our conscience, that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom but by the grace of God, and supremely so toward you. | 2 Corinthians 1:12
Paul here calls upon the testimony of the conscience: you know the sincerity of his heart because you have seen the product of it in his actions. The conscience connects our trust in God to our what we do. To sear the conscience is to disconnect this. It is to declare that nothing is more right than anything else and that there is no way to honor God.
This puts everything on an equal playing field. Nothing is more righteous than anything else, so it doesn’t really matter what you do. When you blur the line between good and evil you begin to believe that neither really exists. Searing the conscience can make us less likely to be convicted by our sin. It leads us to trust in our earthly wisdom more than we trust in simplicity and godly sincerity. There is another way that a seared conscience can affect us:
LEGALISM
Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. | 1 Timothy 4:1–5
This isn’t what we would think. Paul ties a seared conscience here to those who forbid marriage and require abstinence from food that God created good. A seared conscience may not lead to throwing out all law, but embracing as law, things that God never declared. This gets difficult, because our conscience may lead us to deny aspects of Christian liberty. We may be led, by the Spirit, to abstain from aspects of life that are allowable to Christians, for the sake of our worship. The issue is not the self-denial, but the declaration of this as law. Those who have had their consciences seared no longer have a place for personal discernment; everything becomes an issue of right and wrong. A searing of the conscience can lead to a denial of absolute truth or a misappropriation of absolute truth. Instead, we must press into the Spirit, and allow Him to reveal to us what are eternal issues and what are personal boundaries. We must reject what He reveals as a stumbling block to our faith, have grace with those who are tempted differently, and work together for the growth and maturity of one another; that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.